Less(33)
Almost sixty years ago, just after midnight, a few feet from the river where they danced, a wonder of modern engineering occurred: overnight, the Berlin Wall arose. It was the night of August 15, 1961. Berliners awoke on the sixteenth to this marvel, more of a fence at first, concrete posts driven into the streets and festooned with barbed wire. They knew trouble would come but expected it in degrees. Life so often arrives all of a sudden. And who knows which side you will find yourself on?
In just such a way, Less awakens at the end of his stay to find a wall erected between his five weeks in Berlin and reality.
“You’re leaving today,” the young man says, eyes still closed as he rests sleepily against the pillow. Cheeks red from a long night of farewell, someone’s lipstick kiss still smudged there but otherwise unmarked by excess, in the way only the young can manage. His chest as brown as a kiwi, slowly rising and falling. “We are saying good-bye.”
“Yes,” Less says, steadying himself. His brain feels like it’s on a ferryboat. “In two hours. I must to put clothes in the luggage.”
“Your German is getting worse,” Bastian says, rolling away from Less. It is early morning, and the sun is bright on the sheets. Music comes from the street outside: beats from nonstop Berlin.
“You still to sleep.”
A grunt from Bastian. Less leans down to kiss his shoulder, but the young man is already asleep.
As he rises to face the task of packing again, Less endures the ferryboat’s tumble within himself. It is just possible to gather all his shirts, layer them carefully as pastry dough, and fold the rest of his clothes within, as he learned how to do in Paris. It is just possible to gather everything in the bathroom and kitchen, the mess of his middle-aged bedside table. It is just possible to hunt down every lost thing, to pinpoint his passport and wallet and phone. Something will remain behind; he hopes it will just be a sewing needle and not a plane ticket. But it is just possible.
Why didn’t he say yes? Freddy’s voice from the past: You want me to stay here with you forever? Why didn’t he say yes?
He turns and sees Bastian sleeping on his stomach, arms spread out like those of the Ampelm?nnchen who signaled East Berliners: walk or don’t walk. The curve of his spine, the glow of his skin, pimpled across the shoulders. In the big black iron bed of these last hours. Less goes into the kitchen and starts the water boiling for coffee.
Because it would have been impossible.
He gathers his student papers to grade them on the plane. These he carefully slips into a special compartment of his black rucksack. He gathers the suit coats, the shirts; he makes the little bundle that an earlier traveler would have hung from a stick over his shoulder. In another special place he puts his pills (the Head was right; they do indeed work). Passport, wallet, phone. Loop the belts around the bundle. Loop the ties around the belts. Stuff the shoes with socks. The famous Lessian rubber bands. The items still unused: sun lotion, nail clippers, sewing kit. The items still unworn: the brown cotton trousers, the blue T-shirt, the brightly colored socks. Into the bloodred luggage, zipped tight. All of these will circle the globe to no purpose, like so many travelers.
Back in the kitchen, he loads the last of the coffee (too much) into the French press and fills it with the boiling water. With a chopstick, he stirs the mixture and fits it with the plunger. He waits for it to steep, and as he waits he touches his face; he is startled to feel the beard, like someone who has forgotten they are wearing a mask.
Because he was afraid.
And now it’s over. Freddy Pelu is married.
Less pushes down the plunger as with cartoon TNT and explodes coffee all over Berlin.
A phone call, translated from German into English: “Hello?”
“Good morning, Mr. Less. This is Petra from Pegasus!”
“Good morning, Petra.”
“I just wanted to make sure you got off okay.”
“I am on the airport.”
“Wonderful! I wanted to tell you what a success it was last night and how grateful your students were for the little class.”
“Each one became a sick one.”
“They all recovered, as has your assistant. He said you were quite brilliant.”
“Each one is a very kind one.”
“And if you’ve found you’ve left anything behind you need, just let us know, and we’ll send it on!”
“No, I have no regrets. No regrets.”
“Regrets?”
(Sound of flight being announced) “I leave nothing behind me.”
“Good-bye! Until your next wonderful novel, Mr. Less!”
“This we do not know. Good-bye. I head now to Morocco.”
But he does not head now to Morocco.
Less French
Here it comes, the trip he dreads: the one when he turns fifty. All the other trips of his life seem to have led, in a blind man’s march, toward this one. The hotel in Italy with Robert. The jaunt through France with Freddy. The wild-hare cross-country journey after college to San Francisco, to stay with someone named Lewis. And his childhood trips—the camping trips his father took him on many times, mostly to Civil War battlefields. How clearly Less remembers searching their campsite for bullets and finding—wonder of wonders!—an arrowhead (time revealed the possibility his father had salted the area). The games of mumblety-peg in which clumsy young Less was entrusted with a switchblade knife, which he fearfully tossed as if it were a poisonous snake and with which he once managed to impale an actual snake (garter, predeceased). A foil-wrapped potato left to cook in the fire. A ghost story with a golden arm. His father’s delight flickering in the firelight. How Less cherished those memories. (He was later to discover a book in his father’s library entitled Growing Up Straight, which counseled paternal bonding for sissy sons and whose advised activities—battlefields, mumblety-peg, campfires, ghost stories—had all been underlined with a blue Bic pen, but somehow this later discovery could not pierce the sealed happiness of his childhood.) Back then, these journeys all seemed as random as the stars in the sky; only now can he see the zodiac turning above his life. Here, rising, comes the Scorpion.